Building your practice’s brand online is not all about building the best looking website. It’s about building a repeatable, predictable process that can be pointed towards any of your initiatives to grow your practice. This could mean initiatives like promoting you as a thought-leader on the treatments you provide, promoting a book you authored, or the launch of a new telehealth program.
To do this requires time and strategy. This is also the reason many of your competitors aren’t doing it. Successfully executing results in additional impressions, and ultimately more new patients.
The best part of building your practice’s brand online is that it has a cumulative effect, and will be working in the background for you while new content is continually produced and promoted.
Remember, you can build as much content as you like, but if you’re not promoting and sharing it, no one is going to buy. This requires both helpful, valuable content and promotional messages that attract readers to build your brand.
The key to a growth strategy like this is connecting these activities, not starving the budget, and staying involved in the process.
Pitching the Press
After you’ve established your goals, committed to a content schedule and started production, it’s time to begin press outreach. The first dozen or so placements are literally so you can say “as featured in”, and build the attache of the practice. From there, leverage previous logos to go get more.
While soliciting the first piece of content, continue to produce the next piece. Repeat this process. We normally recommend no less than two pieces published per month. After the initial ramp up you should be in a constant routine of creating, soliciting placement, getting content published, and promoting.
Promoting
How quickly this happens depends on how much content you publish and how much you promote. You need to build an audience outside of your current patient base before you are able to attract new potential patients to engage with you, buy your book, or subscribe to your service.
Note: It’s important to make your existing patients aware of what you are doing as well! Getting them to engage with your content will reinforce your messaging and service.
Paid Advertising
Applying paid advertising to this content is another attraction strategy which will speed up the time it takes to create the audience and realize results.
This means, utilizing Pay Per Click on Google Adwords or Facebook Ads. This provides a much quicker hit to compliment the longer-term press outreach, as the audience on both Facebook and Google is much larger than a blog or publication.
Social Media
Innovation, Authenticity, and Regularity are the key elements to a productive social media strategy.
This means anything from Paid Snapchat Geofencing, to utilization of Free Google Posts. It also means being active on Twitter and Facebook. While it’s important to produce written content, in these channels it’s more effective to use images, gifs, and video.
Reviews and Ratings
Add further credence to your brand by increasing the number of positive reviews on popular rating websites like Google, Facebook, and Healthgrades. Keeping these profiles robust and completes is another factor that reinforces
If you don’t have a system in place to get your patients rating and reviewing you, start now! Real customer-driven content is powerful and lacking in a modern practice environment: Reviews are the new word of mouth!
Getting Started
It’s no longer enough just to practice great medicine and provide superior treatment outcomes. These offline realities need to be reflected online so new patients can find you.
To get started you need to go where your audience is going. It’s critical to determine that when coordinating these brand building strategies. In order to build your audience’s confidence they need to find you and your services outside of your own website. Over time, this becomes easier as you gain more relationships in the press, you’ve honed your paid advertising campaigns, and have engagement from your patients in the form of social media and reviews.
When it comes to online you don’t need to follow Mom’s advice: the more you talk about yourself, the more you’re talked about.
